The birth of the group Tinariwen in 1982 was intimately linked to exile and the consequent social upheaval experienced by the Touaregs. All the members of Tinariwen are natives of the Adrar of Iforas region in northeastern Mali. During the 1970s they sought refuge from drought and conflict in the southern Algerian town of Tamanrasset. Their lyrics call for the awakening of the politics of conscience and tackle the problems of exile, repression and territorial sovereignty. Arising from this painful period of exile, the group first took the name Taghreft Tinariwen which means ‘the enlightenment of the nation’ in Tamashek, the Touareg language. The original members slowly consolidated into a fully fledged group and added female backing vocalists to enhance their musical expression. Tinariwen performed in all kinds of settings….marriages, baptisms, gatherings and traditional feasts at encampments deep in the desert.

Members of Tinariwen met Lo’Jo, the French group from Angers, in the Malian capital Bamako in 1997. These meetings lead to the first Festival in the Desert, which took place in January 2001 near the village of Tin Essako in the far northeastern corner of Mali, deep in the southern Sahara desert. In the weeks leading up to the festival Tinariwen recorded a set of songs in the studio of the Tamashek speaking Radio Tisdas in Kidal, the capital of northeastern Mali. The sessions were produced by English guitarist Justin Adams, now a member of the Robert Plant band, and Jean-Paul Romann, Lo’Jo’s sound engineer. Apart from the regular Tinariwen line-up (see below), the recordings also featured contributions from the legendary Kheddou and the poet guitarist Japonnais, key figures in the group’s history. ‘The Radio Tisdas Sessions’ CD was released on Wayward Records at the end of 2001 and with hardly any promotion went on to sell well in the UK and USA. Tinariwen then came over to Europe to tour extensively in 2001 and 2002, performing at the WOMAD and Roskilde Festivals and many other venues. In April 2003 they laid down the raw tracks for their forthcoming album ‘Amassakoul’ which is due out in Jan / Feb 2004 on Emma Productions in France, and different labels around the world.

Tinariwen are the creators of a new and contemporary style of Touareg music. This style is often simply referred to as ‘guitar’, because the instrument symbolizes the modernity of the group’s approach. Another name given to their style is Tishoumaren, or ‘of the ‘ishoumar’. It has played a determining role in the growing cultural awareness of the Touareg youth. The songs themselves are living, imaginative and often profoundly real evocations of the identity of the modern Touareg people. Exile and resistance were originally the major themes of the ishoumars but as time passed Tinariwen and their songs have expressed the wider struggles of daily life in the Tamashek speaking countries. Theirs is a song of love born in a time of conflict.

Tinariwen are not only the original ishoumar group, they are also the most famous. The members of the band are living legends of contemporary Touareg music. Today the group comprises around seven to ten people who have mostly settled back in their native town of Kidal, administrative capital of the Adrar of Iforas region, after living for a period in Bamako, the capital of Mali.

The instrumentation that the group uses is simple despite its modernity. Their link with traditional Touareg music is still clear. The instruments are of three types. First, strings, essentially guitars, acoustic or electric, but occasionally also other more traditional instruments like the tehardant or the n’goni which play the melodies. Secondly, the lead voices, which perform lyrics supplied by a composer. All the musicians join in with the choruses. Thirdly, the group use the percussion instruments commonly found in the desert. The most important is simply handclaps. Touareg music carries you away on a gently rhythmic journey, in step with the languorous pace of the camel.

The Touaregs are the nomadic inhabitants of the southern Sahara desert. They are the descendents of the Berbers, who were the original inhabitants of North Africa. For centuries the Touaregs lived a nomadic life, herding goats and camels around the pastures and oases of the Sahara. They also controlled the great trans-Saharan caravan routes, which linked black Africa with the Mediterranean region. Freedom of movement was always essential to their existence. When the French colonialists came at the end of the 19th century they met fierce resistance from the five Touareg confederations, which they only managed to quell with a mixture of brute force and divide-and-rule diplomacy. The Touaregs bitterly resented the taxes, territorial restrictions and other impositions of their new French overlords. These problems only worsened when colonialism ended and new independent nations were established in West Africa. The Touaregs found their ancestral home divided between the newly created nations of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Mauritania and Lybia. Like the Kurds, they became a stateless people.

In 1963 a rebellion by the Touareg people of the southern Sahara was brutally suppressed by the government of the newly independent republic of Mali. As a result the first great migration of Touaregs from their homelands in northern Mali to Algeria was set in motion. The cumulative effect of severe droughts in 1973 and 1974 also resulted in a massive exodus to the big cities of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. A new diaspora established itself in these unfamiliar urban surroundings and their exile was tainted by rootlessness and social upheaval. Young Touaregs abandoned the age-old nomadic and pastoral way of life and became part of a precarious wage economy, alternating between low-paid menial work and unemployment. This new generation of Touaregs was called ‘Ashoumar’, or ‘Ishoumar’ in the plural, after the French word ‘chomeur’ or ‘unemployed person’. The young exiles developed a new political outlook whose central credo became the struggle for social justice and freedom for the Touareg nation. In 1990, a group of Touareg freedom fighters launched a major rebellion in Mali. On 11th April 1992 the Malian government and the rebels signed a national pact of reconciliation. Nevertheless it was only at the dawn of the year 2000 that the Iforas region in northern Mali, home of the Kel Adrar group of Touaregs, gradually began to up to outsiders after years of isolation imposed by the bitter conflict.